In response to the Great Financial Crisis, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and many other central banks have adopted unconventional monetary policy instruments.  We investigate if one of these, purchases of long-term government debt, could be a valuable addition to conventional...

We enrich a baseline RBC model with search and matching frictions on the labor market and real frictions that are helpful in accounting for the response of macroeconomic aggregates to shocks.  The analysis allows shocks to have an unanticipated and a new (i.e. anticipated) component.  The...

What is the optimal instrument design and choice for a regular attempting to control emissions by private agents in face of uncertainty arising from business cycles?  In applying Weitzman's result [Prices vs. quantities, Review of Economic Studies, 41 (1974), 477-491] to the problem of...

We present an empirical analysis of the effects of labour market institutions on the employment dynamics over the cycle. In the first part of the paper a theoretical framework is provided with particular emphasis on working time regulations. The conclusions of the theory are tested in the second...

This paper asks how well a general equilibrium agency cost model describes the dynamic relationship between credit variables and the business cycle. A Bayesian VAR is used to obtain probability intervals for empirical correlations. The agency cost model is found to predict the leading,...

This paper incorporates limited asset markets participation in dynamic general equilibrium and develops a simple analytical framework for monetary policy analysis. Aggregate dynamics and stability properties of an otherwise standard business cycle model depend nonlinearly on the degree of asset...

This paper estimates a New Keynesian model to investigate to what extent labour market reforms undertaken by the Thatcher government in the late 1930s and the introduction of a constant inflation target in 1992 might have changed the UK economic outlook if they had been introduced in the early...

This paper uses a VAR model estimated with Bayesian methods to identify the effect of productivity news shocks on labor market variables by imposing that they are orthogonal to current technology but they explain future observed technology.  In the aftermath of a positive news shock,...

This paper embeds labor market search frictions into a New Keynesian model with financial frictions as in Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999).  The econometric estimation establishes that labor market frictions substantially improve the empirical fit of the model.  The effect of the...

This paper studies how key labor market stylized facts and the responses of labor market variables to technology shocks vary over the US postwar period.  It uses a benchmark DSGE model enriched with labor market frictions and investment specific technological progress that enables a novel...